SLR Magic announces 17mm T1.6 lens for Micro Four Thirds

Hong Kong-based lens maker SLR Magic has announced an addition to its family of video-oriented manual focus fast primes for Micro Four Thirds. The 17mm T1.6 offers an angle of view equivalent to 34mm on full frame, and has geared focus and aperture rings. It will be available at the end of December 2013.

Press release:

NEW: THE SLR Magic 17mm T1.6

SLR Magic expands its micro four thirds lineup with new wide angle lens

Hong Kong, China (December 13, 2013) - SLR Magic expands the micro four thirds lens lineup with the new SLR Magic 17mm T1.6 wide angle lens. With this latest addition, the portfolio of lenses for the micro four thirds system is now comprised of seven focal lengths.

The field of view of this new lens corresponds to a 34mm lens in 35mm format and this fast wide angle of view opens up many new creative composition opportunities, particularly in the fields of interior, architectural and landscape cinematography and photography. Additionally, a fast max aperture of T1.6 makes the SLR Magic 17mm T1.6 ideal for available-light photography.

We place our highest priority in the development on our lenses to fulfill the demands of professional cinematographers and photographers. The design and build of the SLR Magic 17mm T1.6 is solid and reliable.

The SLR Magic 17mm T1.6 will be available from authorised SLR Magic dealers starting end of December 2013.

Comments

For all the trolls (yabokkie etc..): if you do the aperture equivalence, you also have to do the ISO equivalence.

To imitate an image captured by four thirds 17mm/1.4 ISO 6400 (clean on an E-M5), you'd have to set your full frame camera to 34mm/2.8 ISO 25600. Suddenly the comparison becomes less attractive when you do *full* equivalence...

aperture equivalence is for every photographic effect that is controlled by an aperture, simple and straight forward.

nothing to do with ISO, which is no photographic concept.

for digital cameras, ISO is mainly used to suppress high readout noise at low light. new sensors (basically everyone except Canon) are called ISO-less that little difference in image quality can be observed setting a camera at base ISO.

Equivalence means whatever you want, if you are selective on comparison variables.

What's the rationale for declaring the sensor with less light gathering area "clean", insisting on equivalent exposure indicator to the user (rather than actual light gathered pp) , picking an extreme point on the degrees of freedom (widest aperture), and fixing it arbitrarily at f/2.8 on the other?

If you had a 35mm/1.4 on full-frame, the MFT could not "imitate" that either but the FF could simply crop [given an appropriate lens, which is equally arbitrary if I do not have it].

Having both non-FF and FF systems, it's actually handy to be able to select multiple trade offs in terms of depth-of-field control, quality, weight, capability and so on. Pretending they don't exist is what is unattractive.

4/3" can just use 18/0.7 to achieve every effect that 35/1.4 can have on full-frame, or 12-35/1.4 to compete with 24-70/2.8.

the beauty of aperture equivalence is that it includes every photographic effect with no exception. I would appreciate if we could have deeper DoF and higher light gathering capability at the same time but the God decided he won't let that happen.

He's right. Aperture equivalence is straight mathematics, and there's a two stop difference between full frame and 4/3. Photographically, 12-35 f/1.4 (4/3") is 24-70 f/2.8 (FF) in all respects.

ISO equivalence is a fudged concept, because the manufacturers play around with the numbers so much. You can use it as a crude rule of thumb, but the only way to have true ISO equivalence is to have the same sensor manufacturer, using the same sensor technology of the same era, and the same number of pixels. Only then will you be close enough to a level playing field to make a difference - and you'll very likely see the noise performance of ISO 6400 (4/3) looking close to identical as ISO 25600 (FF).

Full frame is the standard. All other formats are size/performance/cost issue compromises. Nobody converts focal length or apertures into 4/3 or APS-C equivalents. I'm not in any way knocking 4/3rds, it's my preferred set up due to the size/cost/performance combination. But facts are facts

"Full frame is the standard. All other formats are size/performance/cost issue compromises"...like the medium format for example?Why on earth should be an ancient concept of 1930s' still only standard in photography today? I mean, i like the format, but I also like APS-C or4/3 or whatever. It is called "standard" because in film era, it was the amateur format and is the most well known due to it. The size of the frame was chosen because it was the minimum film area with so-so image quality. That is no truth today! With digital, you can minimize even more - and the "fullframe" was developed with miniaturisation in mind...

Aperture equivalence per se is fine, but using it on the solution to one particular exposure only, to prove that one format is better is a crock. You can't assume that 4/3 ISO 6400 is "clean" whilst 25600 on a 4x larger sensor is not (even if that's true for some pairs of camera models).

Are you still trolling yabokkie? Come on now, you know that to work out the total light gathering ability of a camera you need to consider the quantum efficiency of the sensor too, as if you look at the output of an 8 year old FF dslr it's on par with today's aps and m4/3 cameras

for those who don't want to call 35mm format "standard", scale may be the word for better description. it's not large or small, good or bad, it's just a "de facto standard scale" that the audience can grasp easily.

The largest aperture (lens opening) is F1.6/T1,6.The smalles will be F16 f16T-stops are similar to an F-stop but they take into account the light transmisson of the optical elements themselves which varies according to how complex the lens is.So this will be a genuine F1,6 lens in light transmission and lenses that quote an F-stop only are usually not quite as bright as claimed due to the light loss of the glass elements.This is important for cinema where differences in light levels of a subject taken with different lenses at the same F-stop could cause continuity issues

standard 50/1.4 primes have a T-number of about 1.6. (true for both currnet Canon and Nikon ones)

but this lens is for 4/3" where a 17mm f/1.4 should be able to do the same work as a 34mm f/2.8 (in terms of angle of view and light gathering capacity and whatever photographic effect related to aperture size).

Slower than 35/2? You mean faster. The F-stop (or T-stop) means, how bright is the projected circle, not how big. That means F1.6 on4/3 is faster than F2 on FF and that is faster than F2.8 on medium format. only the projected circle differs in diameter. But optically, the speed of the lens in totaly unrelated to the size of the medium.

No. It has better low light gathering ability. It projests brighter picture. The so called " superior light gathering ability" of the FF is achieved through bigger sensor area - so the camera can gather more light throu a dimmer lens. The small room with brighter light is just brighter than great hallway illuminated by a dim one. Butz the "amount of light" in the big hallway will be greater. You understand? "Fastness" of the lens is physically given and has nothing to do with sensor area or a light gathering ability of the camera. people often mix those though...

This is stolen from another (smart) dpreviewer, but explains the relationship between F(T) on FF and M43 very well.

"This is true only if you compare for the same focal length (expressed in mm), which is not a very photographically relevant comparison since a 50 mm lens has a much wider field of view on an FF camera (where it is a normal lens) than on an MFT camera (where it is a short tele with the same field of view as a 100 mm lens on an FF camera).

If, instead, you compare at the same field of view and the same subject distance, then it is the other way around: FF has more shallow (i.e. less) DoF than an MFT camera at the same aperture and has to be stopped down two stops further to reach parity.

For example:

An MFT camera with a 25 mm normal lens at f/2.8 at a focus distance of one meter will have a DoF of 13 cm.

An FF camera with a 50 mm normal lens at f/2.8 at the same focus distance will have a DoF of 6 cm. However, if you stop down to f/5.6, the DoF increases to the same value as for the MFT camera at f/2.8, i.e., 13 cm."

A lens is "faster" if it allows a higher shutter speed at the same sensitivity (ASA, ISO, DIN) and maximum aperture.. That's why it's faster! An f1.6 lens will always be faster than an f2 lens. To get the same shutter speed, the camera with the f2 lens will have to use a higher sensitivity.

Depth of field is a completely different characteristic, related to size of medium (film or sensor), focal length of lens and aperture.

However, lens speed is but one of many factors involved in image quality. One very real advantage of the micro-four-thirds format is it allows a higher shutter speed without losing depth of field (at the camera's base sensitivity = best sensitivity), a great help with image quality!